In 2016, swing-state residents tried to “trade” their votes to defeat Trump. Now Colorado lawmakers want to criminalize it.

Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams last year pushed to ban vote trading, but the language was stripped out of the legislation in a House committee amid concerns about the provision’s constitutionality.

Denver Election judges survey and check voting ballots filled out by members of the Logic and Accuracy Test Board during a test of the ballot system in the counting room at the Denver Elections headquarters October 13, 2016.

Shrugging off questions about the measure’s constitutionality, Colorado lawmakers are looking to criminalize so-called vote trading, saying the practice threatens the integrity of the state’s elections.

For the uninitiated, vote trading is a somewhat obscure political maneuver in which a red- or blue-state voter “trades” their vote with someone in a swing state so that their ballot will have a better chance of affecting the outcome of the race.

It’s a strategy with limited utility, in that it ostensibly requires a swing-state voter to voluntarily give up some of their political power. But in 2016, the “NeverTrump” movement spawned a number of websites and smartphone apps designed to facilitate such trades.

Say there’s a Gary Johnson supporter in Colorado who acknowledged the Libertarian candidate wouldn’t win the state, but wanted to vote for Johnson regardless. That voter could be convinced to “trade” their vote to someone from a state like Texas or California, who would vote for Johnson, in exchange for the Colorado voter casting their ballot for Democrat Hillary Clinton, in an effort to prevent now-President Donald Trump from taking office.

The practice dates back to at least 2000, when Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader was siphoning off support from Democrat Al Gore.

It’s not clear how prevalent vote trading has been in Colorado. But lawmakers believe they may have inadvertently facilitated it with last year’s measure legalizing ballot selfies — self-photographs of a completed ballot, which some vote traders use as a receipt, of sorts, to prove that they kept their word.

Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams last year pushed to have the ballot selfie measure to include a ban on vote trading, but the language was stripped out of the legislation in a House committee amid concerns about the provision’s constitutionality. After the state of California tried to crack down on vote-trading websites following the 2000 election, the 9th U.S. Circuit of Appeals in California ruled that the practice is protected by the First Amendment.

“Although California certainly has valid interests in preventing election fraud and corruption, and perhaps in avoiding the subversion of the Electoral College, these interests did not justify the complete disabling of the vote-swapping mechanisms,” Judge Raymond Fisher wrote in the 2007 opinion.

This year’s measure, Senate Bill 76, carries the same constitutional question mark — but lawmakers so far are shrugging off the legal concerns. The measure, which makes vote trading a misdemeanor offense, passed the state Senate with unanimous, bipartisan support and is now awaiting its first hearing in a House committee.

“We’re trying to have a system (where) everybody’s vote counts and it’s your vote and not something you’ve contrived with others,” said bill sponsor Sen. Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, in a recent committee hearing.

Suzanne Staiert, the deputy secretary of state, says a vote-trading law would give her office the ability to send cease-and-desist letters to websites that broker such trades. “If they want to sue and say they think it’s legal, that would be a new lawsuit that we would defend in federal court in the 10th Circuit,” she said in an interview.

Effectively, she said, vote trading means “someone in California is voting in a Colorado election. … We have ineligible voters playing in our election.”

Statehouse reporter Brian Eason joined The Post from the Indianapolis Star, where he covered city hall for the news outlet's watchdog team beginning in 2014. Before that, he was an investigative reporter at The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., and covered local government at The Leaf-Chronicle in Clarksville, Tenn. He graduated in 2009 from the University of Missouri with degrees in journalism and political science.

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